Using robots.txt file to announce Sitemaps

How do you use the Robots.txt file to tell search engines where your Sitemaps are?

First off, every website can (and should) have a robots.txt file in a standard location, usually at http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt. The Search Engines have now agreed that you can let them know about your Sitemap in the robots.txt file.

All you have to do is add a line similar to the one below to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Make sure you include the full URL, including the http://. - That’s it!

It is still useful to submit your Sitemap through Webmaster tools so you can make sure that the Sitemap was processed without any issues and you can get additional statistics about your site

Last but not least, Ask.com is now also supporting the Sitemap protocol. And with the ability to discover your Sitemaps from your robots.txt file, Ask.com and any other search engine that supports this change to robots.txt will be able to find your Sitemap file.

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